Every day, on average, twenty-two veterans commit suicide. That number does not include drug overdoses or car wrecks or any of the more inventive ways somebody might less obviously choose to die.

It seems trivial to suggest those lives might be saved - healed, even - by a song. And yet there is nothing trivial about Mary Gauthier's tenth album, Rifles & Rosary Beads, all eleven songs co-written with and for wounded veterans. Eleven of the nearly four hundred songs that highly accomplished songwriters have co-written as part of the five-year-old Songwriting With Soldiers program.

Gauthier's first nine albums presented extraordinary confessional songs, deeply personal, profoundly emotional pieces. Maybe that's where the confessional song cycle ends, for she has midwifed these eleven new songs in careful collaboration with other souls whose struggle is urgent, immediate, and palpable. And none are about her.